Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Minute Meditation – Our Gift of Service

“Trust in God; trust in God.”—Bl. Solanus Casey

If Solanus Casey demonstrated anything, it’s that holiness can be found in the simplest of actions, such as just listening or talking to people. How would you describe holiness?

Bl. Solanus is a great example that there are many avenues and ways one can be a witness to people. He was not allowed to preach or hear confessions, but in his work as a porter and sacristan, he still ministered to many. In your life, what are some avenues that offer you a chance to serve others?

Has there any been a time that someone underestimated your abilities to do something? What was your reaction?

—From the book Guided by the Saints: A 30-Day Journal for Inspiration and Direction
by Susan Hines-Brigger

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Minute Meditation – Our Deepest Desires Link Us to the Divine

For Catherine, God may test humanity, provoke growth with suffering, and even permit the devil to tempt souls. But God never violates or coerces human free will—an arena that is off-limits to the devil as well. Participation in the incarnation is not automatic but depends on our desires. Catherine warns against purely external and superficial engagement with God. She encourages her followers to attend to their deepest desires because it is precisely these authentic desires within their hearts that make possible the link between the human and the divine.

— from Accidental Theologians: Four Women Who Shaped Christianity
by Elizabeth Dreyer

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Minute Meditation – Mary’s Story

Story. That is the great gift the Scriptures give us in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. And it is those stories and a few other short vignettes in the Gospels of Mark and John that form the basis of what we call mariology, the study of the theology that derives from the story of Mary and her son Jesus. And her son Jesus was and is the reason, the root, and the complementarity that makes her story complete… That is why we lift up our hearts and pray, as Christians have prayed for centuries, “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – Focus on the Love

Mary would have to remind herself whenever she would remember and start to dwell on Jesus’s suffering, that love redeemed it all, and with the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, she again saw in a flash of light that love was the reason from all eternity. Jesus came to love us and show us the love of the Father and how we are to love the Father. And with that vision, there seemed no past anymore, or even future. Everything was now, everything was new and exciting in the present. And how marvelous to live in that reality that was a preview of what was to come but more importantly, was already here, happening in her. She was living in the kingdom and all that needed to happen was that moment when she entered and saw the kingdom of love that was already there inside and all around her.

— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – In the Waiting

And now in this new rebirth of Jesus, Mary could still see her own love in the eyes that looked back at her as he walked upon the earthen floor, much as he had walked the first time he waddled and stumbled into her arms, a little baby boy becoming. She had held Jesus in her arms once he’d walked so determined but hesitantly toward her open arms; she had held him lifeless in her lap when he was taken down from the cross; she would now wait for him to embrace her with the love with which she had embraced him all the days of his life. Even when he left home to embrace the Father’s will that he preach and teach, suffer and die for the people of Israel, she embraced him lovingly in her heart every day as she waited for the next mystery to be revealed. When God works upon us, she thought, then the real working of our lives is in the waiting, waiting to receive what is given us when we wait upon the Lord in all we are and all we have.

— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – What It Means to Love

Mary is the model of what it means to love because love means helping those who need us, even when we ourselves might be in need. Mary is not self-absorbed. She even teaches her son, Jesus, that those in need take precedence even over the ministry or work we think is all important.

What about us? Who do we spend most our time thinking about? Whose needs are always on our mind? Isn’t it usually ourselves? But what is Mary telling us? Mary is our spiritual mother, and she is saying to us, as she said to her son, “Don’t forget those who have a more pressing need than you do. Remember to remember others. How can you be of help?”

— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – Living a Story

We are not just our minds. We live and move and have our being in and with the world around us. We experience our lives through all of our senses, and all of that experience is conveyed in story, which is more than ideas and beliefs. Story has movement and sound, and portrays how we interact with our environment, with humans and all living things, from plants to animals to the landscape of our lives in time.

— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – The Mysterious Faces of God

Here in Ephesus, she was now as she was then: a girl, a woman, waiting and watching for the angel who would announce the word of her passing into the heaven where her Son ruled at the right hand of the Father. She was not afraid. She needed no Gabriel to reassure her. She’d lived too long in the immensity of the mystery to doubt. Nor did she wonder who she would be in eternity. She would be who she always was: Mary, the mother of God’s Son. She suspected that would be her role for all eternity: mother, woman, the completion of the love of the mysterious faces of God—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—the mystery moving through the three of them into her, visible in eternity as it is invisible on earth.

—from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – Resting in the Light

She is remembering now what she has stored up in her heart all these years. It began the first time she experienced the Light that is God. It dwelled inside the angel’s words, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35). That is what happened in the very moment of the angel’s speaking. And she embraced the light that was the words themselves. She said yes to so beautiful a proposal, its light, its love. And she said simply that she was God’s handmaid. May it be done to her according to God’s word spoken by the angel. And the Light then filled her whole being. And the angel left her alone with the light illumining her womb.

— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM

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Minute Meditation – What Do We Expect?

Despite knowing from the onset that following Christ means two sure things—God is ultimately in charge, and nothing we can say or do will prevent God’s plan from being successful in the end—we have certain expectations, even certain demands, for the way things should go. Sometimes, even when we know these two constants, we find ourselves on the road to the kingdom but instead of being filled with joy, we’re frustrated and disappointed. Often we discover that our hopes are not of the kingdom at all, but of our own creations and fantasies. If we want to follow Jesus, we must let go of our hopes and expectations, our visions for the future, our demands for the present, and remain radically open to what God is doing right in front of us.

—from the book Let Go: Seven Stumbling Blocks to Christian Discipleship
by Casey Cole, OFM, page 20